José Gustavo Arocha 
KEY POINTS
- Maduro’s capture and arrest created expectations for an immediate democratic transition, but the regime’s criminal-state infrastructure remains degraded but resilient and operating as part of a system sustained by criminal organizations, illicit revenue, and extra-regional facilitators.
- The United States’ three-phase plan (stability, recovery, transition) encompasses the challenge of dismantling Iranian military capabilities, paramilitary networks, transnational crime groups, shadow fleet clandestine oil trade networks, illegal mining, money laundering, and the Russia and China encroachment.
- The success of the first phase, which aims at stabilization, depends on neutralizing Iran and its proxies in Venezuela, severing the command links between security forces and irregular militias, and cutting off financing channels through crime and contraband and oil smuggling.
THE POST-MADURO OPENING
On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. The operation demonstrated American military capabilities and created space for Venezuela’s stabilization and recovery. However, Maduro’s capture does not automatically dismantle the regime’s hybrid criminal state architecture.
That structure functions as a network that mimics institutions and has a rapid capacity for reorganization and adaptation. Although operating more cautiously under pressure from the US, the infrastructure that allowed Maduro to survive persists.
Venezuela’s core threat is not a single individual but a hybrid criminal-governance system that fuses repression, illicit economies, and asymmetric enablers. The regime’s center of gravity is a patronage-and-protection network anchored by General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) and the Presidential Guard.
Challenge 1: Iranian Military Infrastructure
Iran’s footprint in Venezuela is operational military infrastructure embedded in-country that can survive leadership change and be exploited during transition. Tehran’s assistance extends beyond UAVs to anti-ship missiles, fast attack craft, and loitering munitions, supported by enabling personnel, logistics, and sustainment capacity.
Systems can be dispersed, transferred, or activated by regime remnants, criminal actors, or Iranian proxies to disrupt ports, intimidate transition authorities, and raise the cost of U.S. and partner engagement. The Mohajer-6 (reported as operationally deployed with approximately 2,400 km range) underscores that this is a regional security problem.
What to Watch: Security lockdowns or unusual movements around El Libertador (Maracay) and Puerto Cabello; airlift and logistics anomalies consistent with dual-use movement; signs of coastal denial posture such as fast-boat patterns or restricted maritime zones; narrative framing that portrays inspection or dismantlement as occupation.
Challenge 2: Colectivos and Militia Networks
Colectivos are not simply gangs on the margins. They are politicized, regime-aligned irregulars that can be fused with elements of the security state to produce rapid, deniable coercion during transition.
In the current environment, the risk is amplified by elite competition and dual-power dynamics, where figures tied to the repression apparatus can mobilize hybrid armed coalitions through loyalty-driven, non-standard command relationships.
This erodes formal control while enabling fast mobilization, weapons dispersion into dense urban terrain, intimidation, and localized coercive governance.
What to Watch: Public mobilizations and readiness events with sudden cross-institution coordination; weapons dispersion into unofficial stockpiles and increased armed presence in dense barrios; localized coercive control including checkpoints, extortion taxes, and targeted threats against civil society and opposition; emergence of no-go zones and parallel security structures that replace formal policing.
Challenge 3: Transnational Criminal Organizations
Transnational criminal organizations and irregular auxiliaries, especially Tren de Aragua (TdA), the ELN, and FARC dissident structures should be treated as integrated instruments of Venezuela’s hybrid criminal-state, not independent external criminals. These actors function as strategic enablers that extend coercion, generate revenue, and provide deniable force projection across borders.
They control corridors, enforce illicit taxation, stabilize black-market governance, and manufacture insecurity to shape political outcomes when needed.
Their operational value lies in flexibility: they can shift between crime, intimidation, migration predation, and political violence while maintaining plausible deniability and a regional footprint.
What to Watch: Sudden territorial calm paired with informal governance such as taxation, extortion, checkpointing, and forced recruitment; corridor consolidation along border routes, mines, ports, and migration pathways; selective violence including targeted killings and intimidation of local leaders, journalists, and opposition organizers; cross-border signaling with spikes in criminal activity tied to Venezuelan political moments; narrative pushes for accommodation or local peace that implicitly grant these groups staying power.
Challenge 4: Shadow Fleets and Maritime Smuggling
Venezuela’s shadow fleet is not simply a sanctions-evasion workaround. It is the maritime spine of a state-embedded trafficking infrastructure. Assessments indicate a shadow fleet of over 50 tankers using AIS manipulation, ship-to-ship transfers, and complex routing, enabling a dual-use pipeline that can move sanctioned crude while supporting cocaine concealment and transshipment economics.
This maritime layer is protected by Cartel de los Soles-linked facilitation embedded at ports, airports, customs, and security services, converting sovereign infrastructure into a criminal logistics platform.
The system is integrated end-to-end: riverine corridors and overland trunks feed egress nodes, while ports and air gateways provide cover mechanisms; clandestine airstrips add redundancy when maritime pressure rises.
What to Watch: AIS-dark gaps, spoofing, and ship-to-ship activity near terminals and anchorages; disappear-reappear tanker behavior and unclear custody outcomes; port anomaly signals including unusual container routing, bonded-warehouse use, concession shielding, or sudden personnel changes at Puerto Cabello and La Guaira; air-route substitution with shifts to drug flights via clandestine strips when coastal pressure increases; riverine throughput markers on the Orinoco corridor; radar stand-down patterns enabling drug flights.
Challenge 5: Illegal Gold Mining
Illegal and semi-legal gold extraction, centered on the Arco Minero del Orinoco, is a strategic revenue engine that finances coercive actors while degrading sovereignty through armed governance and ecological destruction.
Mining corridors are protected by state-linked structures and armed partners, with strategic partnerships providing legal cover while DGCIM and SEBIN presence impose kinetic control.
Independent reporting estimates that $2.177 billion from 2023 gold production accrued to the political elite and allies, while only approximately 14 percent entered public patrimony, an archetypal parallel treasury that persists through transitions.
The scale and harm profile of the Arco Minero, armed domination, displacement, and toxic contamination—make it both a financing platform and a long-term destabilizer.
What to Watch: Chokepoint behavior on major routes including checkpoint densification, taxation routines, vetting, and selective protection; rebadged continuity with rapid reissuance or expansion of strategic partnerships and opaque ownership; armed governance signals including ELN expansion, taxation of pits and mills, and reduced friction with security forces; high-value exfiltration patterns tied to gold movement; environmental and human-security indicators including mercury and cyanide processing growth, indigenous displacement, and forced labor or sexual exploitation reports.
Challenge 6: Cryptocurrency Networks
Within the shadow governance grid, cryptocurrency is not a side-channel. It is the system’s high-velocity settlement layer that keeps illicit governance solvent when banking access tightens.
The regime’s gray-finance stack blends stable coin rails (primarily USDT), over the counter and peer-to-peer marketplaces, cross-chain bridges, and mixers to launder proceeds from narcotics, illicit mining, and sanctions-busting oil trades, converting dirty cash into portable, deniable liquidity.
When pressure rises on one node, the network reroutes value through cheaper, faster pathways—front companies, informal brokers, and wallet ecosystems—preserving the protection economy even if individual operators are replaced. Public reporting indicates PDVSA has required digital wallets and USDT for spot oil deals, and wallet-linked evasion has already triggered countermeasures.
What to Watch: USDT spikes to PDVSA-adjacent wallets and new wallet clusters emerging after enforcement actions; bridge-hopping patterns and mixer bursts that align with oil and shipping tempo; growth in over the counter and peer-to-peer off-ramps and informal broker activity that masks beneficiaries; widening information gaps in compliance creating space for clean intermediaries to unknowingly service dirty flows.
Challenge 7: Extra-regional Adversaries Encroachment
The stabilization inherits not only illicit networks but an external strategic enablement layer. China is the primary architect of Venezuela’s digital and infrastructure dependence, while Russia provides persistent state-to-state anchoring and diplomatic-security scaffolding.
Beijing’s penetration extends beyond finance: it has helped build the regime’s digital spine for control, telecom dominance, identity and payment systems, surveillance and cyber support, and gained leverage at physical chokepoints.
Huawei controls an estimated 60 percent of Venezuela’s telecommunications infrastructure, while ZTE built and embedded the Carnet/Patria database, storing highly sensitive citizen data and enabling politically conditional access to basic benefits.
This is paired with strategic infrastructure exposure such as major port modernization agreements that translate commercial presence into logistics leverage.
What to Watch: Continuity signals in the digital control stack with renewals or maintenance for systems tied to identity services; foreign technician embedding and opaque service contracts tied to previously sanctioned entities; chokepoint leverage moves including port and airport concessions or security upgrades framed as purely commercial; diplomatic choreography that prioritizes Russia, China and Iran alignment with high-visibility signaling and accelerated commission activity.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The sequencing of the US strategy is feasible, and its chances of success increase if it includes immediate measures to dismantle Iranian capabilities in Venezuela. The set of actions should include inspections in key locations such as El Libertador/Maracay Base and Puerto Cabello with verifiable chain of custody and monitoring, synchronized with interdiction on maritime routes, combating and preventing the complementarity of security services and irregular executors.
Multiple sources indicate power remains concentrated among figures whose incentives may diverge from a pro-hemisphere outcome, even if they cooperate tactically under U.S. pressure. Policy principle: no strategic trust, only verifiable compliance tied to measurable dismantlement, weapons accounting, prisoner releases, severing protection for organized crime, and opening institutional access.
The central warning is that fragmented approaches fail because the dangers reinforce each other. The innovation is the systemic approach that has as its axis maritime siege combined with the seizure of vessels and control of mining corridors simultaneously.
Successful stabilization will inevitably have to put pressure on extra-regional actors and criminal networks inside Venezuela. The collateral result should be the overflow of this influence into neighboring countries.
The United States needs to coordinate cooperation mechanisms with Colombia, Brazil, Caribbean partners and Panama in the areas of surveillance and maritime, border controls, extradition treaties and financial intelligence.
When Ukrainian forces examined a captured Mohajer-6, they found 75 percent of components were foreign-origin, highlighting Iran’s reliance on international procurement networks that Venezuela can also tap.
CONCLUSION
Discussion of elections in Venezuela is premature as long as there is no explicit stabilization phase. Maduro’s removal may have opened a political window, but it has not disarmed the architecture of power: the coercion, illicit economies and foreign enablers that sustained the hybrid criminal-state remain capable of reorganizing themselves under new management.
In this context, elections tend to operate less as an instrument of democratic transition and more as a mechanism for re-legitimizing a system that is still captured – with campaigns under intimidation, rigged institutional arbitration and informal territorial control, where the vote is managed by those who retain power and money.
Stabilization, therefore, is not a post-election addendum; it is the condition of possibility for the election itself. It requires, in an integrated manner, the dismantling of the Iranian operational presence and other harmful extra-regional influences that function as survival insurance for internal networks, combined with the coordinated attack on criminal finance and the coercive apparatuses that have colonized state functions (ports, borders, documents, contracts and financial systems).
Only when there is a real degradation of these capacities – recovering a legitimate monopoly of force, institutional control and minimal predictability – will the electoral process be able to produce democratic governability, instead of consolidating a managed continuity.
Equally critical is how Venezuelans themselves respond to the opening created by stabilization. Will they sustain civic mobilization by building new spaces for participation, or will a society shaped by decades of authoritarian constraint default to waiting for results rather than organizing for them? Each trajectory carries distinct risks and advantages that must be managed with clear-eyed realism and political sensitivity—reading social signals early, preventing disengagement or radicalization, and building the coalitions needed to move from stabilization and recovery to a durable democratic transition.
